Afghan asylum seekers in Germany are going on secret holidays back to the war-torn country despite claiming they fled persecution.
Rogue travel agents are offering package holidays to Afghan refugees and asylum seekers, even though the country is deemed unsafe, the German broadcaster RTL reported.
Germany has taken in around 300,000 refugees from Afghanistan, which has been under the rule of the Taliban since the United States’s chaotic withdrawal from the country in 2021.
If asylum seekers in Germany are caught travelling back to the country from which they fled, they risk being stripped of their protected status.
Now, whether it will actually happen is another thing…..
This was happening with Syrians while Merkel was in charge. It caused quite a stink, hence the rules brought in to stop it.
It won’t happen to any significant extent. Modern states often have policies as window-dressing, relying on the incompetence, laziness, fear or political beliefs of their employees to ensure that they don’t get implemented.
That’s why the UK’s current festival of exemplary justice is so noteworthy.
If this comes as a surprise to anyone they haven’t been paying attention.
Germany has taken in around 300,000 refugees from Afghanistan,
Germany will never be a real country again.
It could be safe to make a brief visit using a German passport in one’s new name (adopted after one arrived in Germany) while being dangerous to resettle, especially if one’s profession (such as teacher of girls in higher education) is haram. Most countries accept tourists as money-machines without as much question as dissenting nationals.
But the travel agents are certainly rogue
Probably safer than setting up the training camps in Europe.
Thousands of Afghans called Heinrich Schmidt wandering around the streets of Kabul and Kandahar…
( Actually they are probably all called Max Mustermann as that is the name used on example photos of ID cards and passports )
Let’s get real, John. These people will not be going to Afghanistan on a tourist holiday. They already know what it looks like. They’ll be going to see family & other people they know. Which’ll mean everyone there will know who they are. Which is supposed to be the reason they’ve been given refugee status. That it’s not safe for them to be around their old haunts because they’re a known problem for the Afghan authorities.
I’ve known of endless so called “asylum seekers” doing the same. One minute they’re telling you how hazardous their country is for them. Next they’re off to see & stay with the family. And one’s supposed to accept both stories. It’s like someone telling you they can’t work at heights because vertigo. And then they tell you they’re going on a climbing holiday or skydiving.
@ bis
You seem to assume that their family’s neighbours will split on them – maybe in Stalin’s Russia but Afghans are still quite tribal.
John77
Being at the wrong end of a looted M-15 can be quite a tongue loosener.
@ Ottokring
Yeah, but you’re assuming that someone has *already* split on them
“ You seem to assume that their family’s neighbours will split on them – maybe in Stalin’s Russia but Afghans are still quite tribal.”
Tribes are well known for families having festering feuds within them. If the are genuine asylum seekers there’s probably a bounty on their heads so someone will sob them in to whoever pays them the most.
John. If their families are that tight, why do they need to leave the country?
More to the point: how is it the West’s problem to accommodate these people who are so tight with their neighbors and family back home and so out with the authorities?
How do these people enrich the UK? Tourist would give money in exchange for goods and services. Refugees only take.
The negative consequences of allowing these people in and paying them are visible all the time. The positive ones are invisible and may be nonexistent.
@ M
The UK has a duty to accommodate all those Afghans who helped the British Forces (and their families).
Refugees usually work in their host countries (some in the UK are currently forbidden to do so by Gordon Brown but that is an eception to the general rule) – I suppose that you have never looked up Huguenot on Wikipedia, or studied the significant benefits that we in the UK but also the USA received from German Jewish refugees during and since the 1930s.
You think that Marks & Spencer is worse than useless – OK, that’s a tolerable viewpoint I just happen to disagree. The negative consequences of Einstein and Oppenheimer are that we are not fluent in Russian and/or Japanese. One of the best medical equipment companies in the UK is based on the inventive genius of a German Jewish refugee and the management/engineering talents of his two sons.
I could go on for umpteen boring paragraphs
Anne Frank successfully hid from the Nazis for two years, so by the arguments I read above she was in no need of asylum. Except, of course, she was famously discovered shortly after that and got sent to concentration camps which killed her.
It’s quite possible for someone who could not live openly in a country to be able to sneak in for short visits. Even if they have local enemies, it may be quite practical to ensure that the enemies only find out after they have left again.
And in any case, it’s none of our business. If someone wants to risk their liberty and life on a visit, why should we punish them for that?
The ‘sensible’ people in this thread need to get real. These are not people sneaking home covertly for a flying visit under a false name. Cases I knew were all just going back to stay with family over summer just like a lot of Pakistani and Indian immigrants do. Many of those asylum seekers arrived while the war was still raging, and during that period people who wanted to go back to see family would postpone their trip if their home region was too ‘hot’. Now things have calmed down, bar the odd Islamic State vs Taliban flare-up, so I suspect the number of holiday takers has risen substantially.
Such trips would be ill-advised for anyone on a Taliban watch list, for example those who worked as translators for NATO forces, or as women’s rights activists. Hilariously, despite ruling over one of the world’s least functional countries, the Taliban have immigration control – while their people who flee to the ‘developed’ West are largely able to achieve this because we all seem to have given up on the idea.
But I’m pretty sure people on watch lists are not the ones going back, at least if they value their lives, and such people are a small proportion of asylum seekers anyway. Mostly the asylum seekers are from reasonably well-off families (in Afghan terms!) who can afford the smuggling fees and want their kids to get western education and standard of living. Oh, and who can afford the air fare for holidays back home.
On the other hand, the people who think ‘real’ asylum seekers couldn’t do this or they’d be shot need to get real too. The grounds for successfully claiming asylum don’t require you to be specifically marked out for death. The Taliban are brutal enough that it’s not too hard to claim you’re going to be discriminated against in unacceptable ways. Moreover, even if your asylum claim fails, you can get legal status to remain if its too dangerous to send you back (easy to claim during the war, these days you can just talk up the risk of famine or tribal blood feuds) or it would violate your ECHR right to a family life or whatever (which given the way the Taliban run the place should be easy enough to demonstrate).
Basically it’s very difficult to remove someone who comes from a crap country, especially if they conveniently lost their paperwork en route. And there are a lot of crap countries with a rapidly growing population of people who’d love to move out, and they’re getting richer (and travel is getting cheaper) in a way which is going to enable more of them to make a go of it. I’m sure the asylum rules are being abused – just look how many people who arrive claim to be 15/16/17 vs 19/20/21 and the split isn’t plausible, while the incentive to claim to be a child for extra legal protection and more free education is big one. So you’d have to be very naive to think the stated ages are the truth.
But the solution isn’t just going to be ‘enforce the rules properly’ – that’s not realistic. Even someone whose name is on a Taliban death list isn’t going to be able to wave round a sheet of paper which proves it – so other people under less threat are going to make similar but false claims of often indistinguishable validity. Someone who’s 19 isn’t going to say they’re 19 just because that’s the rule, they’ll lose their documents and claim to be 16 or 17. And sadly there’s no really reliable medical test to tell that they’re lying. A lot of these rules are fundamentally broken and unenforceable. The whole system needs to be binned.
I think a sustainable system system would have to look something like this: if you flee here claiming it’s out of fear of persecution in your crappy homeland, we’ll ensure you’re safe from that persecution by sending you somewhere much more safe. But still crap. It won’t save you from poverty, you’re about to experience that again in your new home, but according to you it wasn’t poverty that made you flee in the first place – you managed it before, so I’m sure you’ll be fine. This sort of system would face big challenges to the logistics, the politics, and the legal environment (a few treaties would need to be exited, or rewritten if enough other countries could be found to join in). But it would offer some protection to people in fear of their lives while stopping the incentive to abuse the asylum system to bypass skills, language and financial restrictions on immigration from poor countries to rich ones. What the ‘safe’ destination countries make of self-proclaimed refugees holidaying in their supposedly ‘unsafe’ homelands would be an issue for them to sort out.
@Anon – “It won’t save you from poverty,”
Why is it ok for a person to starve to death due to poverty but not ok for them to be persecuted? Or ok for them to live a miserable life due to their government being incompetent, but not ok if it is due to malice?